Deep Collaborative Filtering Based on Outer Product

Recently, deep neural networks are widely used in recommendation systems, but most of them are used to process auxiliary information of recommendation systems such as items’ descriptions and images. When it comes to how to learn a better interaction function to model the relation between user latent features and item latent features, which is the most critical step in a recommendation task, most works employ matrix factorization together with the inner product. However, it is sub-optimal because of ignoring many correlations between latent factors. As deep neural networks perform well in building more complex non-linear models, we employ deep neural networks to improve the collaborative filtering algorithm, solving the problem of implicit feedback which is the most common scene in real applications. Some recent work has contributed to finding better interaction function, but these functions are not exact enough to model comprehensive correlations among latent features. In this work, we propose the Convolutional Neural Networks based Deep Collaborative Filtering model (CNN-DCF) to solve the key problem in the recommendation system. Based on the outer product and deep neural networks, we develop a correlation extraction module that can learn high-order correlations between item latent features and user latent features. Extensive experiments on the public implicit feedback dataset Yelp show that the proposed CNN-DCF model brings significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.